Jan 21, 2008

Happy Martin Luther King Day everyone, if you have the day off you are lucky, and I hope yo are having a great three day weekend. If you have to work like me, then I am sorry. What can you do right?

Well if you have been reading recently, I asked all of you guys for advice in creating a test environment for upgrading from Blackberry Enterprise Server 4.0 to 4.1. I am sorry to say that you guys were no help at all. I did have one comment on it, but it was a sales pitch for Blackberry Hosting services which is not an option here so I deleted it. I'll tell you what I found out on my own though.

For this upgrade you pretty much have three ways of doing it. One is you backup your database, then upgrade and hope for the best. For 98% of you this is fine. The upgrade is supposed to be a fairly smooth one. I have some friends at another company that did this and it worked for them.

The second option which we are going to do is use a cut over process. You build a second almost identical server. You backup your database from the original, restore it on the new, then you shut off services on the old server and turn services on the new server. Once services are on the new server you upgrade the new server. This way is good because if there is a problem with the upgrade you can go back to the old server and resend service books.

The last option which we were going to do is called the phased migration process. This is really the optimal way of doing it because you can slowly migrate users a little at a time and monitor everything in case of problems. If there are issues it only affects the small group, and not everybody, and you can always migrate them back if there are problems. The reason we didn't go for this is because to do this you need to purchase a $1000 migration kit due to the need for additional SRP credentials.

I should be doing this upgrade Friday. I will let you all know how it goes.